GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE VERSUS GOOGLE SEARCH

TRICK:

Once Google has begun to index your website, a little "trick" you can do is compare how many pages are indexed in Google Search Console versus in a Google search. This "trick" can give you insight as to how well your page SEO is performing. Let me explain...

Let's say Google Search Console shows you have 256 pages indexed.
If you go to Google search and type `site: https://www.yourstore.com` into the search bar, you might see you have 210 results.

Based on the Google search result, you can see that you have 46 pages (around 8%) that Google has not indexed, and are therefore not showing up in Google search.

Because Google requires pages to have a specific level of quality before they are indexed, some pages are not indexed. This quality is your on-page SEO factors. Things like:

• Is there enough text content on the page?
• Do images have alt tags?
• Does the HTML have a logical and structured organization?
• Are there spammy links pointing to or from the page?
• Is there another page from your website that is about the same thing, only better?

From this example, you can see about 8% of the pages are not high enough quality to be indexed. But, knowing your website, you can probably guess that these lower-quality pages might be small collection pages, or old pages with very little content on them. This is okay - since those pages aren't key traffic pages anyway.

But...

Let's say your Google Search Console showed about 13,000 pages indexed but Google Search only showed 7,600 results. That means almost half of your website was either not found by Google's crawler or the quality was too low to be listed in Google Search at all. This means you have a problem, and your traffic is going to be a lot lower than it could be.

This "trick" won't show you WHICH pages are not indexed, but if you look at your top landing pages in Google Analytics, you can rule out those pages as not being indexed.

If you have a high percentage of pages not showing up in Google Search, you'll need to go back through your pages, and improve their SEO. You can repeat this "trick" any time, and hopefully you will see more and more pages get indexed over time.

BONUS TIP:
If you want to see ONLY your products that Google has indexed, you can use this code:
`site: https://www.yourstore.com inurl:products` (no spaces EXCEPT before the "inurl" part).

NOTE: If your default website doesn't use the "www" as part of the URL, you can leave the "www" out.

(originally shared on 9/22/17)